Tarot Dreaming: Learning from the Deck Makers

Tarot Deck Makers Interview Series

Ever in pursuit of finding the next leaping off edge from which to enrich Tarot play, I am ecstatic to have launched my Tarot Deck Makers Interview Series this month. My goal is to glean insights from deck makers around the globe about their creative process and about the ways in which they personally were changed by engaging with the Tarot at that level of intensity. To commit to making an entire deck is to commit to symbol walking through the Tarot lineage that came before and to be willing to riff and play and enter one's own symbol-scape in search of symbols and patterns of benefit for those of us living here, now. Here are images from two different Tarot Decks and excerpts from my first two interviews.

Rachel Pollack, much revered Tarot scholar, author of 37 fiction and non-fiction books, and author of what is often referred to as the Tarot Bible, 78 Degrees of Wisdom, spoke about some of the results of creating the Shining Tribe deck:

There was a much greater intimacy with the cards, not just my own deck, but others.  I discovered that the Tarot can have a great sense of humor, and play with you through the cards it gives you.  The Shining Tribe deck also led to a major practice of mine I call Wisdom Readings, in which we ask the cards questions beyond personal issues.  The first Wisdom reading was "What is the soul?" I pulled just one card, the Ace of Birds, an owl in darkness staring intently at the reader.  Other people have adopted the practice of Wisdom readings, so creating my own deck has led to a contribution to the history of reading cards.  

Read Rachel Pollack’s full interview here.

Regarding the Poet Tarot Deck, makers Kelli Russell Agodon and Annette Spaulding-Convy of Two Sylvias Press shared:

Our deck follows the traditional Tarot deck with a few variations. As we stated above, the major arcana is made up of poets—Edgar Allan Poe represents the Devil (XV) while Emily Dickinson is the Hermit (IX). E. E. Cummings is a great fit for the Fool (O) and William Butler Yeats, a good symbol of transformational Endings (XIII). The suit cards represent the stages of the creative process: Muses/Inspiration (Cups), Quills/Creation (Wands), Mentors/Revision (Swords), and Letterpresses/Completion (Coins). The guidebook accompanying the deck is 80 pages and includes card explanations, layouts, and ideas for using the cards for specific projects.

Read the full interview with Two Sylvias Press here.

While I have a dream list of Tarot deck makers to interview, please don’t hesitate to contact me with suggestions for future interviews.

Tarot Dreamers: Make Your Tarot Deck Course 2, The High Priestess and Her Gifts

I’m pleased to continue to offer Tarot Deck Making classes this fall. The process has been richer than imagined as we explored how to translate the larger ideas behind each card into personal vision cards reflecting our unique histories and future aspirations.

Here’s an example from our first class: my newly drafted Ace of Windmills (Ace for the Suit of Air). It corresponds to the idea that one can stand rooted in all forms of weather, transforming the powerful winds of adversity into alternate forms of energy such as inspiration to create art. Ever since I was a child I have loved standing out in the pre-storm rain and wind and have loved the way wind wakes up the edges of my body.

Want to step in and join us? Our process repeats in seven-week installments; we explore our relationship to the past, present, and future. We do this in a supportive brainstorming community in which we go through a series of writing exercises to help us begin drafting cards in our art form of choice. The assignment of cards--our focus of Major and corresponding minor cards--is what changes. The next seven-week online course starts on November 7 and ends on December 23. By completion of this course, we will have drafted a Major Arcanum vision card for the High Priestess and for her corresponding Minor Mentor cards:

•      Two of Cups (navigating exchanges of the heart between equals)
•      Two of Wands  (balancing our will before action)
•      Two of Disks (juggling projects and commitments to finance while staying spiritually aligned)
•      Two of Swords (working to maintain a peaceful and loving set of thoughts in relation to ourselves so we can thrive internally as well as externally).

Course Cost is $350(*after student feedback from our first course, I've added an additional week to the course to allow for card completion and closing activities). Course communication will take place over a combination of email, Zoom, and private online discussion forum. Prompts, feedback, forum, and Zoom provided; participants are responsible for materials for the art form they choose to practice for the duration of the course. To sign up, visit Wheel of Archetypal Selves Facebook Page page to message me there or email me through my contact page from this blog.

*I’m sure I will offer the full series more than once, so please don’t worry if you miss a particular seven-week course.

San Diego Writers, Ink: Theme, Set, Go Monthly Poetry Workshop

Join me for my first Tuesday of the month workshop in San Diego—drop-ins welcome. The Human Body is the focus for September. We will read aloud from body poems by a variety of poets including Alleyne, Forche, Komachi, Limon, Mandelshtam, Neruda, and more. Bring a friend and your favorite human body poem, tomorrow, Tuesday, December 1st, at 10 am. We meet at Liberty Station. December’s theme is Nature.

Sign up here:

1st Tuesday: Theme, Set, Go with Tania Pryputniewicz

Wheel of Archetypal Selves Newsletter:

Another way to stay in touch with me is through my newsletter which provides poetry and Tarot related news and tips:

Wheel of Archetypal Selves monthly newsletter

The World, Arcana XXI: The Road Trip and The Puzzle

Sea Ranch Chapel

The same feeling that leads us to a “memory” of primeval hermaphroditism has taken people a step further to the image of the entire universe as having once been a single human being... Rachel Pollack on The World Card, "Seventy Eight Degrees of Wisdom."

I woke at 4 am to make a thermos of coffee to add to the van already stocked with gear for two weeks away from home, including a cooler with two frozen hummingbirds and a blonde sparrow I mislabeled a flicker, sorrowful casualties of the cats shrugging off their belled collars. My plan: to deliver the birds to an artist in Northern California. She promises to use their feathers and revere their tiny skeletons which fractionally alleviates the hangover of feline destruction, my guilt at fostering the urban food chain.

In the hours of unbroken reverie, one child per seat row in the van sleeping soundly as we stop-stop-go in the perpetual rush hour traffic of LA, I metabolize the week’s events. I’ve been blogging about the anxiety of exposure that keeps welling up as my book approaches November release date and private poems (such as Peer Counselor) about the past take their place in online journals and print publications...

….so that private narratives become the occasion for public conversation…giving others from that past a reason to reach out, wondering where or how they fit into the tapestry, which is both the risk and the reward every artist and writer faces when sharing work.

Butterfly Shield by Peter Pryputniewicz

Driving, I registered this physical sensation of the body as some kind of magnetic puzzle piece, for so long cloaked, emerging into view. The rest of the pieces, or players, drawn to reconnecting, re-making our collective map, putting themselves in right relation, or asking to relate. Where do I fit? What was my part? Yours? A beautiful, if unnerving, side effect—let’s redraw the collective body, light-filled, all of us grown, matured, bringing our best and most loving selves to re-align in order to forgive and heal one another.

Emotionally it is complicated: perpetrators have mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, children, cousins. So do those who suffer at the perpetrator’s hands. But even those labels (perpetrator, victim) push us too easily on opposing sides of an equation. This part of the journey for me isn’t about blame, but moving on. Yet sometimes you can’t move on until you admit out loud what happened and how.

And if you’re a writer, and/or a blogger, you weigh each biographical revelation against what it might set off in others and yourself.  How do you know if you are going about all of this the right way? Or if it matters to keep living one’s way to the answers to the questions, out loud, word by word? Are you doing more damage than good? Is it time, like a dog with a wound, to don the proverbial scone of that white cone so you'll stop revisiting the wound...time to just let it be, enough already?

Traipsing through such mucky fields of doubt for me requires staying in close contact with other riskers until some omen appears. And appear it did, the following day after driving through the geography of trespass under a three quarter moon:

Through night’s hull, I pass

My hometown. Fog fades treeline,

River’s dim black hem…

Osho-Zen Tarot by Ma Deva Padma, Osho

Fog shrouded the road and I pulled frequently over to let a handful of throaty pick-up trucks zip by. I rolled down the window to clear my head and in rushed that familiar dank marshy smell of ditch weeds. Later, as the road ascended the cliffs, the saltier tinge of ocean air. It was close to 11 p.m. when I safely made it to my destination.

The next morning, I sat with tea and a cherished writer friend. Knowing my love for tarot and nothing of my internal grief over drawing others from my past into the tapestry of my now, she hands me her Osho-Zen Tarot deck (see below for links to the artist and deck reviews). Halfway through the deck, I spot it: the artist’s depiction of The World Card as puzzle, one piece foregrounded, the very one that will complete the face of the soul traveler at her third eye. Perfect out-picturing of this leg of the journey—the third eye’s ability to help us access visible and invisible realms, to witness self and others with compassion.

And later, less tarot-ish omens arrive in the form of correspondence from readers thanking me for the level of reveal they’ve come to expect on this blog, and voicing reminders to remember the exquisite power of nature to heal trauma.

The coastal flowers, vibrant purple and orange, celebrate with me on my morning walk. The deer and the dragonflies come into focus as past loses its grip.

Dragonfly’s stuttered

Thrum. His hoard: eight slight wings sheathed

Violet by the sun.

Dragonfly, I’m later told by another writer, offers this medicine: let go of old illusions about the self.

Like the soul traveler in the Osho-Zen Deck, it’s true, I wish to start anew, standing under the silver hoop of zero as the happy Fool, the clueless Troubadour poised to quest for the next garden of poems. Maybe I will even trust the Gardener again, given the kind and loving bravery of other travelers from both past and the now coming forward to take my hand.

Which puzzle piece have you kept hidden? What does your sanctuary look like? How are you arriving?

Additional Notes:

I'm looking for bloggers to join me live for Beginning Blogging at San Diego Writer's Ink. We start already Tuesday night and still have room for a few more. Visit my teaching page to sign up.

Balancing the Ledger of Relationships: Questions in Novelist Sandra Hunter’s Losing Touch is up on my She Writes Blog. In this reading diary, I look at the universally haunting questions Hunter poses, the kinds of questions that make us rethink our habitual judgmental ways of viewing our loved ones.

The tarot-poet friend mentioned above is Michelle Wing. Her book Body on the Wall deserves more than a mention, in fact I wish I'd read it in time for my earlier post, Revising Guinevere, Ten Writers Transforming Rape or When Trees Mattered More Than Boys. Wing, part poet, part lightworker, helps others cross the bridge of the unthinkable with the program she founded for survivors of domestic abuse, Changing Hurt to Hope. Wing is also currently editing an anthology of writings by participants of the program (due out in the fall of 2015).

The dragonfly-medicine poet friend is Lisa Rizzo (In The Poem an Ocean, reviewed here at The California Journal of Women Writers by Marcia Meier).

Reviews and purchasing information for the Osho-Zen Tarot Deck (St. Martin’s Press, 1995) at Aeclectic Tarot. The deck's exquisite artwork by Ma Deva Padma, Osho. Here's a small paragraph on Ma Deva Padma's process of making the deck and a link to her Embraceart Studio.

Another beautiful poet, risker, brave light, Ruth Thompson of Saddle Road Press (Woman with Crows, Here Along Cazenovia Creek). Here's an interview with her I know you will love on writing poetry, “I wrote myself back to life."

Peer Counselor the poem is up at Chaparral, thanks to editor Kim Young, author of Night Radio, which she discusses in this interview at The Coachella Review.

Photo Robyn Beattie
Cover Design Don Mitchell

Related posts on the process of exposure and healing from date rape:

First Book Publication, Reckoning with Exposure and Astral Rubbernecking on my main website

Thumbelina, Innocence Found at Feral Mom

Lost Wings, Hesitations, and Outgrowing the Metronome at Suzi Banks Baum's Laundry Line Divine.

And finally, I'm in the process of mapping out my book tour for November Butterfly slated to start November of 2014.

I'm open to suggestions for reading venues, and looking forward to reading--please send me an email if you have suggestions. I'm looking at pairing readings with poetry workshops for small groups and venues. 

I'm working on a static page for the book on my main site, but in the meantime here is one of the blurbs I'm thrilled to feature on the back cover:



Photo by Robyn Beattie

In Tania Pryputniewicz’s collection, November Butterfly the lyrical I, looks into the mirror to find a different face with each pass. In this way, Pryputniewicz maintains the intimacy of the poetic I while expanding the personal lyric to a global resonance. As Ophelia, Jeanne d’Arc, Nefertiti, Amelia, Lady Diana, Marilyn and Sylvia come to reflect, we too find ourselves dissolving into the mirror—it is not only ourselves we see in the looking-glass, but the eyes of generations staring back at us. With her gift of deep empathy, imagination, and lyricism, she gives readers the chance to live again and again and again.
–Nicelle Davis, author of Becoming Judas

Marilyn, the poem, originally appeared at Salome Magazine and will reappear in November Butterfly in Section I featuring the iconics. Section II focuses on Guinevere's Camelot and Section III looks at present incarnation. Overall, the book's poems constellate around notions of how women over time thrive at the crossroads of love and motherhood given the inescapable trials of intrusion.

Robyn Beattie's website.

June 30, 2014 update: writer Barbara Ann Yoder just forwarded me a link to the site of The Embodied Tarot, which outlines a list of beautiful ways one could use the body and the tarot to grow and heal. Jennifer, founder, also has a facebook page you can visit.

Photos:

First and third to last photos are taken inside The Sea Ranch Chapel, "gift of two Sea Ranch residents who wished to offer a nondenominational sanctuary....It was their hope that all who enter will find a measure of peace in the blending of art and purpose amid surroundings of beauty and inspiration." (from note inside chapel)

Butterfly Shield artwork, copyright Peter Pryputniewicz.

Robyn Beattie's website.